Live feeds of other situation rooms throughout the world were displayed as tiles under the main feed.
The President was briefed. Long-range sensors had detected the first object approaching Pluto.
Now, control of the meeting went over to the mission commander at Central Command. Live tactical data were fed to screens next to the main display.
He could see a map of the solar system and a green dot representing the object near Pluto.
Next, it moved rapidly through the solar system and approached Earth at incredible speed. It only took three seconds or so to traverse the solar system and near Earth.
The tension was now almost unbearable.
But instead of stopping or slowing down, the object passed the planet quickly and exited the system only seconds after.
There was a collective sigh of relief.
They waited a few more hours before the second object arrived at the perimeter of the solar system. In a few seconds it was at Earth.
Then it stopped.
Chapter 15: Discovery
As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.
– Albert Einstein
Helley woke up with a start.
Her cabin was dark, and the only sound was Elzo next to her, his deep breathing indicating that he was still fast asleep.
She had that damn recurring nightmare again. The one she’d been having sporadically for months.
Small details would sometimes change, but the overall dream was essentially the same each time.
In tonight’s dream, she’d found herself floating for a while above a dark and sparkling sky of stars. It had a weird feeling of loneliness to it.
A ship appeared far below, traversing the heavens. Helley always had the impression that it was running away from something; that something dark and scary was chasing it.
She watched the ship for a while, then one by one, the stars began winking out of existence, and eventually only the ship remained.
Next, the ship disappeared as well, leaving Helley in complete dark and scary emptiness. In the dream her fear felt real, even though it had a hint of childhood irrationally to it.
Sometimes the dream would abruptly stop at this point, booting her out, leaving her in a cold sweat.
The sensation of fear and a strange impression that something was after her, usually lingered for a while afterwards. But sometimes the dream continued, like tonight.
After the darkness, the scene changed to that day she and her dad had held a mini-funeral for Fluxly. The night sky was green and twinkled with stars. Her dream-camera focused on the little grave. One moment it was closed, packed tight with dirt.
The next, it was open, revealing a dark little hole, the dirt scattered around the grave.
Helley remembered thinking “What the...”
Suddenly, and out of nowhere, Fluxly’s disfigured and half rotten undead head jumped right out in front of her face. She woke up with a startled yelp.
She thought it was funny that this didn’t wake Elzo, but then again, he did sleep as dead as a rock. Helley told herself that it was only a dream and she tried to shake off the lingering sensation of fear.
She turned on the bedside lamp, which also did not disturb Elzo in the slightest, then she got up, went to the bathroom for a pee, then splashed her face, had a glass of water and returned to bed. She lay awake for a while and as she reluctantly waited for sleep she let her thoughts drift.
It had been a wild few weeks since that day her memory came back and she landed with her butt on the floor.
Except for a few gaps here and there, she remembered almost everything.
She remembered her dad, the amazing and positive influence he had on her as a child and what a profound impact his death had made on her life. It felt like just yesterday, when she was staying at her aunt’s house, while her dad was away on duty for a couple of weeks, when she watched the live vid broadcast of the Unari colony uprising when the Navy was sent to intervene.
She watched as the Oqara arrived at the colony, with her dad on board, and watched as the ship blew up shockingly unexpectedly shortly afterwards in an almost unreal fireball caused by two powerful bombs from within that were likely planted by Unari sympathizers and saboteurs.
She remembered the pain afterwards and how she struggled to come to terms with her dad’s sudden death. As her mom died from the onset of Susox’s disease years earlier, and there were no grandparents, she moved in with her aunt.
She changed from being an outgoing, bubbly child, to a withdrawn and moody introvert. Helley’s path through school was not easy and she drifted through it by being a disengaged loner and staying on the outskirts of school-life and society.
She had very little to no friends and purposefully pushed everybody who tried to come too close, away. Her relationship with her aunt was estranged and she kept herself separate from the family, from her aunt and her two young cousins, preferring instead to lock herself in her room and work on her secret pet project. This continued straight through tertiary education.
Helley went through a few rocky patches during this time and experimented with drugs for a while, eventually flirting with total self-destruction, but stopped after her aunt intervened.
Having been through something similar before, after losing a close friend, she recognized what Helley was doing and although Helley kicked up fierce resistance, her aunt managed to get through to her eventually.
This was the start of a new friendship with her aunt and for the first time since her father died, she began having a normal relationship with another person.
Helley sailed through university and earned a degree in engineering. Purposely avoiding military vessels, she served in Engineering on several civilian vessels for a few years where she eventually worked her way up to Chief Engineer on the luxury cruise liner, the Axinia.
Although she enjoyed being an engineer, it had never been her true passion. But it paid the rent and helped fund her personal research. Her true talent was experimental and theoretical physics and her passion was her pet project that she started when she was a child, which she continued working on in her spare time.
Helley was in pursuit of uncovering and prying free the keys to the mysteries of the Universe, no less. She questioned the rules of life and death and secretly hoped that if she could find the switch, she could change that and everything else that was ‘broken’ in existence.
She wanted to transcend reality and ultimately tame it. She was a master hacker, a natural, and was able to decipher and master any program. Helley had a strong gut feeling that reality was composed out of ultra-advanced code and believed that if the code could be exposed, then it could be hacked.
And as her journey continued through the years, it eventually led her to explore the realm of the minute, the quantum world; and as she looked deeper, it seemed more and more like a hologram, like a computer simulation.
When she wrote formulae to try to explain the nature of this realm, it began taking the appearance of a very advanced version of something that she was very familiar with. It seemed to affirm what she suspected all along: reality appeared to be made out of code.
But the Universe was not about to give up its secrets so easily, she had to work for it. And even though she was a brilliant thinker with a formidable intellect in her own right, this was a daunting task.
She sometimes felt that it was light-years ahead of what she could possibly understand.
She hit many dead-ends along the way and eventually she had the idea that she had to start at the beginning, that if the Universe was indeed a giant simulation, and it was possible to manipulate its underlying workings, she’d need a rudimentary interface of sorts to be able to access it. It was like a classic computer that required a keyboard or console in order to accept commands.
But first, she needed to try and understand the und
erlying code and as she worked, the theory and formula grew exponentially and became hectically complex.
She knew that the interface was just the beginning, only the first step and that once she cracked it, the real work and real deciphering of the actual Universe Program would only then really begin.
And as some interfaces take energy directly from the main computer to function, and in searching for something similar in the math, Helley quite by accident discovered what seemed like an underlying source of energy running ‘under the surface of reality’.
She figured that it should be entirely possible to build a reactor to plug into and siphon off the energy, which her theory now seemed to confirm. This would allow free access to unlimited, clean energy.
Later, she branched this theory from her main ‘Universe as a Simulation’ concept and continued refining it, in an attempt to make it water-tight and provable as well as assist her in familiarizing herself with the code and getting a better handle on it.
She didn’t really care or give much thought to the possible implications of such a discovery; it was merely an interesting side-effect of her main research.
She even had a naïve idea of submitting a paper on it to the main scientific publications; which she eventually did.
However, she continued to keep her main theories absolutely secret. Physics was her casual hobby, and although she sometimes read some of the main physics and scientific publications, she did not move in those circles and was not part of the greater physics, let alone scientific, community and she had no idea of the politics, the corporate allegiances, the egos, the bickering and petty jealousy, and what it meant to publish work and subject it to peer review in that type of environment.
She submitted her paper and continued with her main research, using what she’d learned to help her towards slowly reaching her next milestone.
A few weeks passed before the first response arrived, which turned out to be the precursor to a torrent of unexpected negative feedback and vitriol.
Her work was severely criticized as wishful, fanciful thinking and her formula was ripped apart as nonsensical gibberish. Her formal qualifications and sanity was questioned and she was branded a joke.
She was told in no uncertain terms to leave theoretical physics to the professionals and to maybe apply herself to a lower, less complicated, menial profession.
Usually not particularly phased about the opinions of others, the unexpected criticism from these so-called experts stung Helley deeply.
She felt stupid that she’d exposed herself like that and regretted ever submitting that damn paper. To top it off, the heavy criticism caused her to let severe self-doubt sneak in, making her wonder if she did in fact know what she was doing and if she actually had any business meddling in theoretical physics in the first place. The whole thing caused a massive dampener on her self-confidence.
But a few days later, she forced herself to go back to her Universe Energy theory and meticulously checked it again and again and ran it through as many stress-tests as she could. And every time, the theory checked out.
Finally, she checked the correspondence from the supposed experts for actual technical comments and feedback on the formula itself and analyzed these.
Then she made a startling discovery: there was very little feedback on the actual formula itself, just a few sparse notes here and there that summarily dismissed large swaths of it with no real justification. It was almost as if they had no inkling as to what they were looking at, and as she worked through all the feedback she received, she became more and more convinced.
These fuckers were all clueless. Apart from just dismissing her work outright, they could not provide any proper justification or solid mathematical proof that her formula was indeed flawed.
She remembered laughing out loud when she discovered this. The discovery gave her a huge amount of relief and a massive confidence boost. But she wasn’t going to fight this; she’d learned her lesson and vowed to never make the same mistake again.
Her brief misadventure in publishing her work was over – besides, if she achieved her goal, none of that would matter anyway.
So with new resolve, she resumed her research and continued her attempt at deciphering the secret code of the Universe.
Months passed and one day Helley was approached by the Imperial Natural Society. They didn’t say much at first, just that they had a proposal and wanted her to come through to the old offices at ninety-three Regal Avenue, just off Main Imperial Boulevard. Skeptical at first, Helley’s curiosity ultimately got the better of her and she decided to check it out.
They told her that they were currently in the process of searching for new technologies that could possibly be viable alternatives to triterium and came across her research during this search.
The Society was willing to give her theory a try with the initial goal of building a prototype reactor. She’d be given a modest grant and a full team to help her build it. If it proved to be successful, the Society wanted to proceed with full-scale industrial production, with her keeping the majority of the profit.
All of this, only if she was interested, of course. Helley remembered being stunned and momentarily speechless when she heard this, sitting in the chair opposite director Krez in the large grand office that was clearly built in the exploratory heyday of the old Imperium. The moment felt unreal, like it was out of a dream.
Helley agreed and for the next few years she and her new team were hard at work trying to build the prototype reactor – which turned out to be a lot harder than they initially imagined. But they kept at it and eventually, they succeeded.
Helley remembered everything from this time for the most part, but there were still some parts missing here and there.
She remembered that she was continuing her secret research during this time, but couldn’t remember anything about the particulars.
Also, she remembered what happened in the lab that night but nothing of the coma afterwards. She remembered waking up, being scared and not remembering anything.
She remembered starting her new life and becoming what she referred to now as ‘New Helley’. She’d come to value and cherish the friendships she made in this new life, particularly with Doctor Beriyana and Captain Ihram and the friendship and later, relationship with Elzo.
Old Helley didn’t care much for relationships and shunned romantic involvement, feeling that such things were ultimately below her and not worth her time. New Helley felt different; she liked Elzo and the passion that they shared together, both intellectually and physically.
And recently, she knew that she’d fallen in love. Old Helley was stuck-up, and a close-book; New Helley was happy, bubbly, friendly and open. And when her memory came streaming back that day in Engineering, New Helley was already well established and in charge.
Not long after Helley and had regained her past memory, she rejoined her Reactor team, where she was welcomed back with applause, and later continued helping them develop a better understanding of her formula and principles of the Reactor.
And as the plan was for the crew to settle somewhere soon, the team decided that it was perhaps a good idea to construct a few more Reactors, with enhanced output for any future settlements, and maybe one day, cities.
And at Engineering, she was promoted to a higher position with greater responsibilities.
The ship’s long range sensors had detected four possible planets en route as candidates for settlement to check out, and initial data seemed to indicate that the nearest was already populated by a relatively primitive species, but the other three further along appeared to be viable.
Helley was tasked to try to increase the speed of the Valiant, so they could get there sooner, and to try increase the resolution and range of their long range sensor equipment to help detect other habitable planets. All this kept her very busy.
But at night, when she was not spending time with Elzo, her curiosity led her to try to piece together what Old Helley
had been working on, before her accident.
She kept the details of her work from Elzo and when he asked what she was working on, she told him that it was personal, and that she was not ready to share it with him yet, but that she would when she’s ready; he seemed to understand and accept it.
Thankfully, her encrypted personal computer and backups were all on board the Valiant. When she first looked at her work again, she immediately got a better appreciation of what her colleagues had experienced when they first looked at her work. For Helley her personal work had a form of order and structure that she understood comfortably.
For an outsider, it looked like a bunch of ordered papers written in a strange alien language which had been blown into chaos by a storm. It even took her a little while before she got to grips with it again.
She noticed that Old Helley had generated volumes more work since the part she last remembered. It wasn’t the type of stuff you could just jump into; you had to start from the beginning.
So she decided to brush up first, and then tried to catch up from where she left off. It was difficult to follow at first with the formula taking on a new level of complexity; but from what she could gather initially, it appeared that Old Helley’s quest had taken an unexpected turn, deeper into the unknown.
Her personal notes had become less and less; she was likely too caught up in her work to bother with something so trivial.
It seemed that Old Helley had caught the scent or trail of something and had been clearly in hot pursuit of it.
What that something was remained a mystery for a while and it would take Helley weeks before she eventually figured it out.
Helley discovered that Old Helley had begun seriously wondering that if the Universe was a simulation, which all her work seemed to confirm, then there might be something outside of it.
Not different dimensions within the simulation, but an actual place outside of it.
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